The good news of spiritual victory in Christ is inseparably wedded together by God to Christ’s resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-4). The impregnable rock on which Jesus built His church (the body of the saved—Ephesians 5:23) is the truth Peter confessed in Caesarea Philippi—Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16-18).
Therefore, if Christ is not risen, a Christian’s faith is empty and futile (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17). If God cannot or did not raise Jesus from the dead, then there is not one sane reason to believe He can take anyone who is spiritually dead in his trespasses and sins and make him alive together with Christ. He is still in his sins and is of all men the most pitiful and pathetic (1 Corinthians 15:17, 19).
“But now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). You can be made alive with Christ, raised up together with Him, and made to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. By grace you can be saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:5-6, 8).
Without His bodily resurrection from a new and borrowed tomb, the gates of Hades would have prevailed against Jesus. Of the many infallible proofs God has given us that Jesus is His Son, the weightiest evidence is His resurrection from the dead.
Jesus’ identity and our salvation from sin are eternally intertwined with God’s power to resurrect the dead.
